|
UFO
REVELATION 7
Dr.
Barry H. Downing
UFOS
AND LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM
The
position of liberal Protestantism in relation to UFOs can best be
described as the sound of one hand clapping. Liberal Protestants are
mostly unaware that UFOs raise issues for Christian faith. This
makes it a challenge to write a whole chapter explaining where
liberal Protestants stand in relation to UFOs. I plan to explore
the scientific and biblical nature of evil in UFO REVELATION 8, in
order to lay the groundwork to evaluate the conservative Protestant
position.
There
are liberal Roman Catholics, and conservative Roman Catholics, but
they do not get separate chapters. Why is that? Roman Catholics
have a Pope who by his authority is able to discipline the extremes
of left and right in the Catholic Church. Protestants have no such
mediating and powerful centering force. The political split in
Protestantism is obvious to all careful observers. Many liberal
Protestants are Democrats, many conservative Protestants Republicans;
liberals are pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, pro-Palestinian rights.
Conservatives are anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and pro-Israel. We
now have blue Protestant churches and red Protestant churches. The
way in which Protestantism has divided has been well documented in
James Davison Hunter’s 2010 book, To Change
the World. Hunter explains how as liberal
and conservative Christians split over political issues, they have
each had less and less influence in American culture as a whole.
Religion is now viewed as something like art, religion seems to add
something to some people’s lives, but has little to do with the way
the world works. Hunter also argues, as a sociologist, that cultural
change comes from the top down, not the bottom up, as many religious
leaders suppose.
When
Luther and Calvin brought about the Reformation, they needed an
authority to match the authority of the Pope, and the authority of
the Bible was the only serious choice available. Using the Bible to
challenge the authority of the Pope in regard to indulgences, as
Luther did, was powerful, and to some extent successful, although
there were political issues between Italy and Germany that set the
direction of the Reformation as well. The Roman Catholic Church
claimed infallible authority for the Pope, many Protestants claimed
infallible authority for the Bible. In some ways it was a stand off.
But
in the mean time, science was challenging the authority of both the
Pope and the Bible. This was the case with the cosmology of
Copernicus, as well as Galileo with his telescope, in regard to the
authority of the Catholic Church; Darwin’s theories of evolution,
from 1859 forward, posed a powerful challenge to the Protestant
theory of biblical infallibility, especially in regard to Genesis.
Some conservative Protestants are still fighting the teaching of
evolution in public schools. But even more important from James
Davison Hunter’s point of view, is that science has created
institutions with great power—our high tech industries, our
research universities, our instant communication and media
centers—that control attitudes and beliefs which Christianity has
not successfully challenged, especially the issues of greed, justice,
honesty and ecology in relation to money and markets. To understand
the direction of modern culture, we need only notice how many
colleges and universities in the United States were founded by
Christian churches, and in the past fifty years, have rejected any
Christian connection.
THE
GOD OF THE BIBLE
The
most basic difference between liberal and conservative Protestants is
that conservatives cling to belief in the infallibility or inerrancy
of Scripture, while liberals gave up that belief, although the
degrees of “giving up” varied. Some liberals might say the
Bible was inspired by God but is not infallible; other liberals might
go so far as to see the Bible as simply a human document, with no
more authority for them than the Koran or the Book of Mormon. For
the most extreme liberals, religion is what the human mind creates—we
create our own values, they are not God given. From the conservative
point of view, some liberal Protestants have gone totally away from
the God of the Bible.
This
is my understanding of the God of the Bible. There are two major
dimensions to the divine revelation; Jesus unifies these dimensions.
The first dimension of God, the primary one, is that God is
imminent. Imminent is not a word I like, so I prefer to say God is
Everywhere and Invisible. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or
whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou
art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there.” (Ps. 139:7,
8) The Apostle Paul spoke of the Everywhere God when he said of God
to the people of Athens, “In him we live and move and have our
being.” (Acts 17:28) It is to the Everywhere God that Jesus prays,
“Our Father.” It is the Everywhere God of whom Jesus says, “God
is spirit.” (Jn. 4:24)
But
it is not the Everywhere God that makes the Bible famous. The God
that made the Bible famous is the God who killed the first-born of
Egypt on Passover night, parted the Red Sea, landed on Mt. Sinai in
sight of everyone and gave commandments for the Jewish faith. The
actions of the Exodus UFO explained in UFO REVELATION 4 are what
define the God of the Old Testament, not his Everywhereness. In the
Old Testament, the claim is made that the Everywhere God has the
freedom to become visible, either as “fire” perhaps, at the
burning bush, or even more, as a voice that is heard, also at the
burning bush. The Everywhere God can suddenly show up in a
particular place, and speak to chosen people. In other words, there
are special times of “revelation,” when the Everywhere God
somehow becomes visible in our world. Theology calls these times of
God’s self disclosure. Likewise the New Testament story of Jesus,
crucified, and raised from the dead, is what defines the God of the
New Covenant, not God’s Everywhereness. But the Christian doctrine
of the Incarnation says that in Jesus, the Everywhere God became
human, became flesh. Jesus claimed a special relation of unity with
the Everywhere God, whom he called Father. This led one of his
disciples, Philip, to say, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall
be satisfied.” (Jn. 14:8) Part of the response of Jesus to Philip
is, “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me,
or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” (Jn.
14:11) Thus what we might call the personality of the Everywhere God
is made perfectly clear in the human person of Jesus. In Jesus the
Everywhereness of God takes human form and lives among us, the
ultimate form of “revelation” or “divine disclosure.” When
Jesus says “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me,” he is
explaining what we might call the “metaphysics” of how the
Everywhere God can also be somewhere, such as in Jerusalem on May
3rd, A.D. 30, or
whatever calendar we use to identify the historical Jesus. Although
Jesus perfectly represents the Everywhere God, we need to remember
that the angelic order was, and still is, the means by which the
Everywhere God breaks out of his spiritual dimension, and enters our
dimension of space and time.
After
the Ascension of Jesus, the Holy Spirit is given at Pentecost. Now
some of the Everywhereness of God, the God who is Spirit, enters
into humans who believe in Jesus. How are we to understand what it
means that “the Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14) in Jesus, or that
Spirit enters into flesh in God’s Church?
Liberal
and conservative Protestants went at these questions from different
points of view. The best summary of these differences may come from
the Apostle Paul himself who described the difference between the
Jewish view of God and the Gentile view of God. Paul said “For
Jews demand signs, and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ
crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and folly to Gentiles.” (1
Cor. 1:22,23) What this means is for Jews, God is to be found in
special signs of power, such as the Passover miracle, or the parting
of the Red Sea, the Exodus revelation. The Gentiles—Greeks in
particular, think of Plato and Aristotle—seek God in a rational
understanding of life and the universe. Greeks lean more toward what
would eventually become science, and an invisible Everywhere God
suites their rationalism. What Jesus seemed to say to Philip was, if
he could not understand the “metaphysics” of his unity with the
Everywhere God, which would be a “Greek” thing to do, then he
should believe in Jesus because of his “works,” his miracles,
which would be a “Jewish” thing to do.
What
I have been doing for more than 40 years is exploring the possibility
that UFOs provide a way to reconcile the split between the Bible and
science, between Jewish “signs” and Greek “wisdom.”
Thus,
when the Protestant boat came crashing up against the rocks of modern
science in the past 400 years, the boat split apart. Conservatives
stuck to their infallible Bible, because they wanted to keep the
signs, the miracles, which were essential to the God in whom they
believed. But liberals took the rationality of modern science
seriously, and given a choice between what their science told them,
and what the Bible said, they went with science, if there was a
conflict. By faith they trusted in an Invisible Everywhere God, but
not the God of signs, the God who parted the Red Sea, or raised Jesus
from the dead.
PRINCETON
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 1960
I
arrived on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary in September
of 1960, a bachelor’s degree in physics in one hand, the Bible in
the other. I arrived knowing there was some kind of conflict between
science and the Bible, but with really no understanding of the
historical dynamics behind the struggle. I soon learned there had
been a historic faith struggle in the seminary, and in my
denomination, about the authority of Scripture. I was to find some
at the seminary who believed in the infallibility of Scripture, while
there were others who thought any kind of human infallibility, either
of the Pope or the Bible, was not only dangerous but heretical, a
denial of our humanity.
Princeton
Seminary sits more or less at the corner of Alexander and Mercer
Streets in Princeton, New Jersey. Albert Einstein lived on Mercer
St., just a few doors down from the seminary, when he worked at
Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. The seminary is on the
south side of Alexander, the University on the north side of
Alexander. The seminary was administratively and financially
separate from the University, but was very much in its intellectual
shadow. Princeton is famous for its Ivy League University, not its
seminary.
I
did not know it at the time, but as I arrived in Princeton, Paul
Ramsey, professor of religion not at the seminary, but at the
university, was writing the Preface to a book written by Gabriel
Vahanian entitled The Death of God: The
Culture of Our Post-Christian Era. Ramsey
would date his Preface as Christmas 1960. The seminary staff would
know about this book, and others like it, but the seminary itself was
committed to the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, not to the emerging
death of God theology. The most exciting event while I was at
Princeton was Barth’s Princeton lectures, delivered in the
University Chapel.
The
Vahanian book in its way saw the clear path of decline for what used
to be our Christian culture, and the negative implications for my
Presbyterian church. (When I was ordained in 1967, the Southern and
Northern branches of my church had a combined membership of about 5
million. Now in a merged church, they have about 2 million members.)
In his Preface Ramsey said, “Ours is the first attempt in recorded
history to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead.”
(xiii) Our emerging scientific world view has eroded confidence in
the supernatural almost to extinction, except among fundamentalists,
according to Ramsey. Liberal Protestantism saw in science at first
an optimism that science would be the means for bringing in the
kingdom of God. When the nuclear age arrived, suddenly science did
not seem like much of a savior, going very quickly from “the wheel
to the whoosh.” (p. xxiv) But science having turned demonic did
not restore the supernatural. It just left despair, godlessness.
Ramsey senses that
“it is still the case that the premise of contemporary culture
(except in the sphere of autonomous science) is not merely the
absence of theistic presuppositions, but the real absence of a God
who formerly lived and had his dealings with men. It means ‘the
death of God’ still present.” (xxv)
The
God who died is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who speaks to
Moses, who somehow overcomes being the God of Everywhere, and becomes
God in a particular place and time. Some liberal theology clung to
the idea of an Everywhere God, perhaps as the “ground of being”
as Paul Tillich suggested, or as the ultimate source of existence.
But liberal theologians began writing articles that pondered
“theology without revelation,” meaning God without angelic
intervention, without God breaking into our world from his
Everywhereness.
I
began to see the problem more clearly my senior year at Princeton,
when one of my professors, in a class on doctrine discussing the
Apostles’ Creed, said, “No one today believes in the Ascension
[of Jesus] do they? And if Jesus did not ascend, where is his body?
We may only suppose his bones lie buried somewhere in the Middle
East.” The professor went on to explain that the Copernican
revolution destroyed the ancient three decker universe, with heaven
above, earth in the middle, and hell below. He suggested we now
needed to see much of the supernatural dimension of the Bible as
mythology, not as historical fact.
Christianity
without the Resurrection and Ascension is now the “orthodox” view
of liberal Christianity. One of the most respected liberal Old
Testament scholars of our time is Walter Brueggemann. I have
attended some of his lectures on the Psalms. What does he say about
the Ascension? “The ascension refers to the poetic, imaginative
claim of the church that the risen Jesus has ‘gone up’ to share
power and honor and glory and majesty with God. It is a claim made
in our creed that ‘he ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right
hand of God the father almighty.’”
Brueggemann
goes on to say, “Now if you want to, you can vex about this
prescientific formulation all you want. But you can also, as I do,
take the claim as a majestic poetic affirmation that makes a claim
for Jesus, that Jesus now is ‘high and lifted up’ in majesty,
that the one crucified and risen is now the one who shares God’s
power and rules over all the earth. This prescientific formulation
of the matter is important, because it gives us imagery of a quite
concrete kind to imagine Jesus receiving power.” (Brueggemann,
Mandate to Difference,
2007, p. 1-2) Brueggemann understands that liberals do not “want
to sound like silly supernaturalists.” (p. 197)
Notice
what Brueggemann does here. He turns narrative into poetry, history
into make believe. The Ascension story in Luke reads as much like
history as do the crucifixion and resurrection narratives. Jesus
warns the disciples it is not for them to know about the end times,
about God’s plans for the future. Their call is to be faithful
witnesses. “And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he
was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
Then
two men “in white robes” said to them, “Men of Galilee, why do
you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you
into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into
heaven.” (Acts 1:6-11) The Bible seems to be telling us what
the biblical people saw when Jesus ascended, but in reality, for
Brueggemann and many liberals, it is only what they imagined. In
terms of the damage to our Christian hope of life after death,
consider this analogy. A travel company runs a contest. Enter the
contest and you win a free trip to Europe. You enter the contest,
and are told you are a winner. You are also told there is no real
trip to Europe, only a poetic one, an imaginary one. Since you are a
winner, feel free to imagine your trip to Europe. It will not be
long before millions of people decide not to enter the contest.
I
believe we need to see the Ascension of Jesus as a UFO event, similar
to the ascension of Elijah in a chariot of fire, and connected to the
“pillar of cloud” tradition of Moses. By the time we get to the
New Testament, “clouds” are a code term, like UFOs are a code
term for us, for a heavenly transportation system. Jesus does
return very soon, but not to stay, in a bright light that meets
Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. (Acts 9, 22, 26) The conversion
of Paul is also part of the biblical UFO tradition, and should not be
read as poetry.
Christianity
which rejected the Ascension of Jesus, and the eschatology of the New
Testament was a shock to my faith. I understood that if you
eliminated the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus we had no hope of
life beyond death, no hope for justice in the next world.
[With
no hope for justice in the next world, Protestant liberalism turned
to the Marxist ideology of a classless society as its source of an
earthly utopian hope in place of a heavenly one. As Dennis O’Brien
has observed, “Marx was opposed to Christianity because he saw it
as a distraction from history, as pie in the sky by and by.”
(Christian Century, May
3, 2011, p. 47) Since Protestant liberals had lost their hope of
“pie in the sky by and by,” Marxism’s rejection of the
eschatology of Jesus was no problem at all—liberal Protestants
didn’t believe it anyway. Liberation theology borrowed the
oppressor/oppressed dialectic from Marxism as its main yardstick of
political analysis, gaining special fame when Barach Obama’s
pastor, Jeremiah Wright, trained in the black liberation theology of
James H. Cone, condemned America as an oppressive nation in such
clear terms that Obama had to discontinue his relation with Wright.
In the liberation theology of Jeremiah Wright, as President of the
United States, Obama would become the head oppressor! It is no small
irony that President Obama gave the order which led to the death of
Osama bin Laden! With little difficulty liberation theology has
morphed into its current secular form, which we usually call
political correctness. Conservative Protestants have often tried to
develop an anti-liberation politics of the right to counter the
Christian political left, which has led to the situation decried by
Brueggemann that we now “enlist as red or blue ministers in red or
blue churches.” (p. 201) I will deal with political division in
church and society in more detail in UFO REVELATION 8.]
I
was in a faith crisis. How could I promise life after death at a
Christian funeral, if the resurrection is seen as mythology? I
decided to do graduate work at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland,
in the area of science and Christian eschatology. In a way, I was
like the woman in search of a lost coin, the coin being eschatology,
our Christian hope that Christ now rules in heaven, and our salvation
will be living eternally in heaven with him. I went to Edinburgh
after graduating from Princeton in 1963. My Ph.D. dissertation at
Edinburgh, Eschatological Implications of the
Understanding of Time and Space in the Thought of Isaac Newton,
was approved in May of 1966, and I returned to the United States.
My
Newton studies did not solve my faith crisis, but UFOs seemed to
offer a possibility. During the Fall of 1965 I began to explore the
Bible from a space age point of view, partly in regard to biblical
angels, but also in regard to what appeared to be biblical UFOs—the
pillar of cloud of the Exodus, the chariot of fire of Elijah, the
wheels of Ezekiel. When I returned from Edinburgh, I set up a study
in the basement of my in-laws home, where I waited for a pastoral
position, and wrote The Bible and Flying
Saucers, which was published in 1968.
THE
WORLD WELCOMES MY BOOK (Don’t I Wish!)
The
book was welcomed with a few favorable reviews, such as in the
Los Angeles Times, which recommended not
missing “this mind stretching reading,” but by and large the
positive reviews were not from theologically trained reviewers. I
had asked publisher J.B. Lippincott to send a copy of my book to Dr.
James I. McCord, President of Princeton Seminary. He was President
while I was a student there. I respected him very much, and he made
financial decisions which gave Princeton a solid economic base which
few seminaries enjoy today.
McCord
acknowledged my book in a letter dated February 3, 1969. In my book,
I had taken clear aim at the “death of God theologians,” and he
said “I enjoyed the cleaning you gave them.”
At
the same time, he had doubts about UFOs. “On the other hand, I
lack sufficient imagination to have proper respect for UFOs. As a
matter of fact, I still think airplanes are ‘against nature.’”
I appreciated the fact that he took the time to read my book, but his
response illustrates where “centrist” theology was, caught
between a dogmatic and narrow commitment to the Bible no matter what
on the right, and “there is nothing in the Bible that is
believable” on the far left. The American government UFO cover-up
was more than enough to put off moderate theologians like McCord.
They understood that the loss of the supernatural to scientific
skepticism was a serious crisis for the church, but bringing in UFOs,
which might not even exist, seemed to be no real solution.
Not
everyone was as kind as President McCord. In a review of my book,
Lester Kinsolving, an Episcopal priest who also practiced religious
journalism, said the publishers of the book needed forgiveness for
printing the book. How could the “publisher of this
pseudo-theological travesty, J.B. Lippincott & Company”
advertise itself as a publisher of good books? I was seen in league
with “frothing Fundamentalism, “ and Kinsolving was distraught
that “this kind of thing is expected from assorted Bibliolatrists
but hardly from Edinburgh PhDs.”
By
and large, I had a better welcome from Catholics than Protestants.
Father Luke Farley, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, reviewed
my book in the August 17, 1968 issue of The
Pilot. After referring to other books, such
as that by Morris Jessup dealing with UFOs and the Bible, Farley
said, “This new treatment by Barry H. Downing, even if it is
theologically ‘far out,’ is by far the best of the lot.”
REJECTION
AND THE LIBERAL THEOLOGICAL PRESS
I
understood the rejection of my work on the grounds that, “UFOs
don’t exist, do they?” As Dolan and Zabel would say, the secret
keepers with their “deny and ridicule” policy in regard to UFOs,
had done a good job of making my book seem too impossible to believe.
Even with proof UFOs are real, there are serious challenges involved
in making connections between UFO aliens and angels. I had supposed
that “eventually the truth would out,” as Dolan and Zabel
suppose, but here I am, more than 40 years after publication of my
book, and still no Disclosure.
In
1984 I sent a survey to 100 Protestant and Roman Catholic seminaries,
addressed to the President of the institutions. I obtained my
mailing list from Patterson’s American
Education. I had 26 survey forms returned to
me. I asked 4 questions in the survey:
-
Do you believe it is
possible some UFOs carry an intelligent reality from another world?
-
If
some UFOs do carry an intelligent reality from another world, what
might be some consequences for Christian theology?
-
Have
there been any formal studies of the relation between UFOs and
Christian theology in your seminary classes? (For instance, has
there ever been a suggested connection between UFOs and the biblical
doctrine of angels?)
-
Using
the Freedom of Information Act, Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J.
Greenwood, in their book Clear Intent: The
Government Coverup of the UFO Experience,
have published formerly secret CIA, FBI, and other Government UFO
documents. Courts have blocked the release of hundreds of pages of
UFO documents in the name of national security. Can you think of
any negative consequences for Christian theology of a Government
policy of UFO secrecy?
There
were some interesting responses, that kind of followed
liberal/conservative lines. In regard to connecting angels and UFOs
in class, one conservative President wrote, “I hope not.”
Liberals were somewhat concerned that there might be a coverup, and
thought we should know the truth; conservatives tended to suppose
that if the there is a government coverup, the government is just
doing its duty.
I
then wrote an article based on the results of the survey, using the
title, “UFOs: Four Questions for Theological Seminaries.” I sent
copies of the article to the following journals, with rejection
coming from all of them: Union Seminary
Quarterly Review, Theology Today, Perspectives on Science and
Christian Faith, Pacific Theological Review, Interpretation, and
Theological Studies. Finally, I sent the
article to MUFON, which published the article in the 1988 edition of
the MUFON Symposium Proceedings.
By
and large, the survey indicated that neither liberal nor conservative
theology had serious interest in looking into the UFO mystery.
Eventually a significant interest would form among Christian
conservatives, but this has yet to happen among Christian liberals.
TED
PETERS—ONE LIBERAL PROTESTANT HAND CLAPPING
The
most substantial liberal Protestant response to UFO theology has come
from Ted Peters, a Lutheran theologian who published UFOs—God’s
Chariots? Flying Saucers in Politics, Science and Religion (1977).
Peters traces the mythological impact of UFOs on science, politics
and religion. Peters, like myself, has long been a MUFON consultant
in theology, teaches at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in
California, and is editor of the journal Theology
and Science.
Peters
takes a psychological approach to UFOs. He takes no position on the
physical reality of UFOs, dealing only with their psychological power
as does C.G. Jung in his book Flying Saucers:
A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
Peters says, “UFOs have a way of drawing out our religious
sensibilities in disguised form, even when we believe ourselves to be
no longer religious. Each one of us has a deep inner need to be at
one with our creator and source of life.” (p. 9) In other words,
we think UFOs are about science, but they are really a “disguised
form of religion.” (Like the Ascension of Jesus for Walter
Brueggemann, UFO stories appeal to our poetic imagination. Liberals
are very comfortable with the idea that religion is something we make
up because we need it.)
When
Peters finally gets to chapter 6, “Toward a UFO Theology,” we
find that he treats three authors: Eric von Daniken (Chariots
of the Gods? 1968), R.L. Dione (God
Drives a Flying Saucer, 1969, and Is
God Supernatural? The 4000-Year Misunderstanding, 1976)
and my own book (The Bible and Flying Saucers,
1968), as a unit, which makes categorical sense, but the three of us
have major differences.
Von
Daniken separates the angels in the Bible from God, saying the angels
are really ancient astronauts, who were worshiped by mistake as
“gods” by the biblical people. What we find in von Daniken is
that he says he believes in God, by which he means the “Everywhere
God,” but he does not believe the angels in the Bible have any
connection to this Everywhere God. They are just a bunch of “ancient
astronauts.” From the point of view of Peters, in our scientific
age, we “need” to turn the angels into astronauts, which is why
von Daniken has been so popular.
Dione,
on the other hand, seems to get rid of the “Everywhere God,” and
turn him into an astronaut who flies his own flying saucer. For
Dione, all the miracles in the Bible can be explained as the result
of some advanced technology, not the supernatural. He too suggests
the Red Sea was parted by technology, as I do, but suggests two
“pillars of cloud,” side by side, parted the Sea. Dione seems
unaware of my book, or my different interpretation of the parting of
the Red Sea. (Dione, Is God Supernatural? p.
63) This leads Peters understandably to complain that UFO theology
seems to “trivialize God.” (Peters, p. 115)
Peters
does a good job of reviewing my work on the Exodus, as well as the
implications of UFOs for the New Testament, and he discusses my work
after reviewing von Daniken and Dione, calling my work a “more
cautious and more sophisticated defense of a von Daniken-Dione type
theology.” (Ibid,
p. 110)
But
in the end of the day, my “sophistication” does not save UFO
theology. “What is startling about the claims of von Daniken and
other would-be UFO theologians is that they actually humanize and
trivialize God. They make natural what we believe to be
supernatural. They make physical what we accept as spiritual. They
say what we once thought to be extraordinary is really ordinary.”
(Ibid, p. 115)
What
we find in the Peters’ critique, as well as in the work of von
Daniken and Dione, is that they do not understand the Dual Nature of
God, first as the Everywhere God, but also as the God who can appear
in angelic form, or even human form (Jesus). Peters does not say to
the UFO theologians, in the words of Philip, “Show us the Father.”
Rather Peters says, “You have humanized and trivialized” the
Father.
Peters
should not blame UFO theology for this problem, he should blame the
Bible. After all, from the point of view of many Jews and Muslims,
they do not believe in the incarnation of Jesus, they do not believe
that if you have seen Jesus you have seen the Father, because that
“humanizes and trivializes God.”
But
because we live in a scientific age, the only God science seems to
allow is the Everywhere God. At the same time, the Everywhere God
is restricted by modern science, and by liberal theologians, from
entering into our space-time. Revelation is not allowed. Angels are
mythological, as are events might have been caused by angels, like
the parting of the Red Sea. Thus, although God may be safe in his
Everywhereness, he cannot get to us by the rules of modern science
and liberal theology. Peters does not seem to have a working
angelology, and does not explore how UFOs may be part of biblical
angelology. The difficulty for liberals is, if UFOs are real,
biblical revelation is back in business. Liberals find it within
their comfort zone to have religion be something we create with our
minds, not something given to us by a Higher Power. It seems strange
that Peters would blame UFO theologians for making “natural what we
believe to be supernatural.” After all, liberal theology got rid
of the supernatural before those of us doing UFO theology said to the
“death of God theologians,” take another look: it is not
unscientific to say the Red Sea parted, Jesus rose from the dead, the
angels of God are still with us. My position is that the biblical
religion is not mythology, but some of the miracles may not be
supernatural either. Whatever supernatural is, Peters does not
explain, nor do my conservative critics.
The
angels in the Bible are reported to be able to eat food, as did Jesus
after his resurrection.
Do
we suppose the bodies of angels, and of the resurrected Jesus, are
supernatural? They seem natural in many ways. Perhaps what we have
with the biblical angels, and with the resurrected Jesus, is that
they come from a universe where the laws of physics are different,
but not necessarily supernatural. (We will explore advanced physics
and biblical interpretation in UFO REVELATION 11.)
From
the point of view of Peters, it is my hope that “Science and
religion can now become friends, according to UFO theology.” (p.
115) I would plead guilty to this charge. I do not accept the
liberal dualism that science deals with reality, while the biblical
religion deals with mythology (and poetry). I realize there are many
forms of religious mythology: the mistake of Christian liberals is to
be way too quick to assume the angels, and the God of the Bible, are
as “make believe” as the ancient gods of Greece and Rome.
An
excellent book from the “religious studies” point of view, rather
than a theological point of view, was written by Brenda Denzler, The
Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the
Pursuit of UFOs (2001). Denzler earned her
Ph.D. in religious studies at Duke University. Her opening chapter,
“A Short History of the UFO Myth,” establishes her point of view.
The question is not, if UFOs exist, what does this mean for
religion? Rather her question is, if people believe UFOs exist, what
happens to their religion? Both Peters and Denzler would be very
comfortable with the arguments of Carl Sagan and Donald Menzel that
UFOs are a modern religious myth. Denzler refers to my work, as
well as that of Peters. She sees my belief that UFOs carry the
angels of God as the strongest argument for an “optimistic
hermeneutic.” (p. 128). She is comfortable with the way Ted Peters
rejects the theological implications of UFOs. (p. 152, 157) If
Dolan and Zabel are right, that Disclosure Day may come upon us, then
liberal religious writers like Peters and Denzler will have to answer
the question: Why did you allow yourself to be taken in by our modern
Pharaohs, and their lies? Msgr. Corrado Balducci took the common
sense view that thousands of eyewitness UFO reports should not be
rejected out of hand, any more than we should reject the eyewitness
reports of the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament. But
Peters and Denzler seem comfortable questioning UFO theologians,
while not questioning the government.
In
1972, Walter Andrus, Jr., invited me to become a theological
consultant to MUFON, and asked me to send articles that could be
published either in MUFON’s newsletter, or in the annual conference
proceedings, and I began publishing frequently with MUFON. MUFON
consisted of many people with a scientific orientation, but who
suspected the government was lying to us. Some members, such as
Andrus, had seen UFOs with their own eyes, they knew the cover-up was
on. For people who were sure UFOs were real, The
Bible and Flying Saucers was not so far out.
I was glad to have an organization that accepted my work, and valued
it.
While
liberals either ignored my work, or saw it as space age religious
myth making, conservative Protestants worried that I am being
deceived, that UFOs are leading me down the road to some kind of
“strong delusion.” In order to weigh the conservative point of
view, we need to explore the biblical understanding of evil. We will
do that in UFO REVELATION 8.
Dr.
Barry H. Downing
June
19, 2011
http://thestrongdelusion.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1646&Itemid=9 Part 6
http://thestrongdelusion.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1628&Itemid=9 Part 5
http://thestrongdelusion.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1621&Itemid=9 Part 4
http://thestrongdelusion.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1608&Itemid=9 Part 3
http://thestrongdelusion.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1593&Itemid=9 Part 2
http://thestrongdelusion.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1574&Itemid=9 Part 1
|
Home 
